One of the rare World War II–set films of the past few decades to be fully relevant on its release, Europa Europa is even more reflective of the dangerous instability and growing fanaticism of today’s nationalisms, ideologies, and religions. While the film is centered on Salomon (nicknamed Sally and played by Marco Hofschneider), Holland is less concerned with excavating his psyche than with mapping his journey through a Europe that refuses his existence. Europa Europa is both intimate and epic. The German-French-Polish coproduction allowed Holland for the first time the resources and a sweeping enough narrative to support her enormous technical skills and her dynamic and implicitly dialectical sense of composition, scale, rhythm, and pace. Holland anchors a big story—one that crisscrosses three countries over seven years and involves, besides Sally, at least two dozen supporting characters and several hundred extras, playing soldiers, civilians, and students—with an accumulation of precise details that speak to contradictions around character, conflict, milieu, ideology, and the desire to belong in order to survive.
The first image we see is of a boy—dressed in short pants and a military jacket with a Nazi armband—swimming underwater, attempting at one point to cling to or fight off an adult soldier as he frantically tries to reach the surface. The image encapsulates Sally’s memory of his seven-year struggle to survive the war, and we soon learn that the entire film is constructed from his memories, which accounts for the expressionism of the camera work, and for the fact that he is present in every sequence. The first thing we hear is Sally, in voice-over, saying, “I was born on April 20, 1925, in Peine, Germany, Europe, the fourth and youngest child of Azriel Perel, the owner of a shoe store, and his wife, Rebecca.” Just so that we understand how important these facts are—that the place and the date of one’s birth and who one’s parents are determine much of what we call identity (despite the fact that the vast majority of movies either ignore or homogenize these facts for the sake of a fantasy of universality)—we hear a fading echo of those first words: “I was born on April 20, 1925, in Peine, Germany, Europe.” Soon, we see through a window the crowded interior of a Jewish home, where a child is being circumcised. And in voice-over again, Sally tells us something that he says we might find unbelievable—that he remembers his own circumcision. Whether this is possible or he has observed other circumcisions and made them his own is irrelevant. The ritual that marks him for life—both placing him in mortal danger and saving his humanity—is established with remarkable narrative economy, but with great attention to sensory detail, including an image of the mohel placing a blade next to the infant’s tiny penis.
The film then jumps ahead thirteen years, to 1938. The day of Sally’s bar mitzvah coincides with Kristallnacht, and the Nazis rampage through Peine, trashing Jewish homes and businesses and attacking people in the street. The family’s only daughter, Bertha, is killed—and it could have been Sally, who was supposed to run the errand she took care of for him. From the first, Holland shows that Sally survives because of luck, because his immediate impulse when he senses danger is to take flight and hide, and because he is young and attractive to women and also to some men, all of whom project their various fantasies onto him. On his Candide-like journey across a savagely war-torn Europe, he is aided by several such figures. In Peine, it is a teenage German girl who has a crush on him. In Łódź, it is a hunchbacked woman who takes tickets at the cinema where his fantasy of life as a movie, with himself as a romantic adventurer, takes root. After he flees Łódź for the Soviet Union and lands at a boys’ school there, it is a middle-aged teacher who tries to protect him. When he becomes a member of the occupying German army battling the Russians in Poland, his secret, discovered during an attempted seduction, is guarded by a gay former actor, who replies to Sally’s question about whether it’s hard to play a character with “It’s harder to play yourself.” And in Berlin, the mother of the teenage Hitler fanatic who has stolen his heart (Julie Delpy) knows Sally’s secret but, like the actor, does not betray him. Setting aside the bravura battle scenes and the grotesquely hilarious dream sequences, the brilliance of Europa Europa is in the casting of Hofschneider, an inexperienced twenty-year-old actor, as Sally, and in the work that Holland does with him to show that the character intuitively understands that his survival in part depends on his allowing those around him to believe anything that suits their fantasies about themselves.
In the United States, Europa Europa was both a box-office and a critical success. It was given the best foreign-language film award by the Golden Globes and by several film critics’ organizations, including the New York Film Critics Circle. In response to the failure of Germany to submit it for consideration for a foreign-language-film Oscar nomination, as West Germany had for Angry Harvest, the Academy found another way to honor the film: by including it in the best screenwriting category. But in Europe, the hostility came from all sides. Holland was accused of anti-Semitism for treating the Holocaust as a comedy, and of Zionism because, at the end of the film, she shows the real Salomon Perel living in Israel, without a sign of discontent. Many German critics also claimed that the film was disgusting, a charge frequently made against Holland for showing the mortal body, alive, dying, or dead, without prettification. In Europa Europa’s most disturbing sequence, Sally, in his Hitler Youth uniform, looks for his parents, riding a streetcar through the Łódź ghetto that was their last known address. The tram windows are blacked out, and the good Germans and Poles who ride from one side of town to the other show no interest in what is happening outside them. But Sally scratches the covering off a small bit of glass and sees, through this frame, bodies piled in the street, while the emaciated living sit or stagger to and fro. It is the only scene of horror that Holland refuses to inflect with black humor.
In 1991, I suspected that what upset the European film establishment was that a director who was born Polish, Jewish, and female had made a mockery not of the Holocaust but of European nationalism and the ideologies of both the left and the right—not to mention her lack of reverence for penises in general. Holland said she took the attacks as proof that these issues were far from settled. The next nearly thirty years have proved her correct. Nor has anything been settled for her. In 2011, she would return to the Holocaust in another great film, In Darkness, and she would treat the failure of democracy in Poland and in other former Eastern Bloc countries in several films and television series, including her twenty-first-century masterpiece Spoor (2017), which depicts a middle-aged woman’s struggle against the corruption and cruelty of the Polish authoritarian, patriarchal state, in decline but refusing to give up its power. Like Europa Europa, Spoor ends with a glimmer of hope, because, as Holland has explained, unless people have hope, they will be unable to imagine the future or act at all.
